WD200JB Loss of LBA Support

[Fireman]

Folks,
Firstly I want to thank you all in advance for any help related to this posting and for the many others I've read on here to try and troubleshoot this myself.
The Drive:
Western Digital WD200JB-00GVA0 (EIDE)
200GB capacity, LBA 390721968
If I left Something out let me know.
The Problem:
Sorry in advance for the rambling
I was copying data from an external USB hard drive to this one, I noticed that the transfer rate was rather slow approx 1MB/s. Thinking this was unusual I checked to make sure I had USB 2.0 support enabled (I had recently installed the Kubuntu Hardy Beta), it was not, long story short I found my way to the BIOS to check it out there, at this time all the drive info here was correct. When I booted back to KDE i noticed that only one of the two partitions on the drive had auto mounted. I tried to mount the other partition manually and it failed. Thinking something was amiss in my partition table I ran testdisk from CGSecurity off a TRK3.3 Live CD. It was at this time that I noticed the drive was not displaying its properties correctly, it was showing up as only being 8.4GB and not 200GB, I manually set the CHS in testdisk to match the correct size and rewrote the partition table still no luck. I checked it out in the BIOS and the same size was detected there as originally reported in testdisk. I thought that possibly the pcb had gone bad because the drive was not detecting correctly, I replaced that with another of identical version/model and it made no difference. I called a data recovery service to get an estimate and he said that it sounded like the system area on the disk was corrupted. That lead me to the forums here, I downloaded MHDD today and tried that. with no success. When I ran the EID command from there I got the the correct S/N, Drive ID, FW, and Cache size. I also had

LBA: 0
Size 0MB
Supports: LBA48 MS16
This drive does not support LBA mode and MHDD will not work with this device

So now I'm lost and in need of some serious guidance. Does any body have any suggestions?

Jeff

[beto]

U need to check ATA registers while tried to access any sector to check wich error´s send while tried to read x sector maybe ABRT, or AMNF, IDNF; after that u need special toos wich access negative cylinders the SA its on negative access, cil, and know the vendor tracks, and of course know the SA structure to access & did diagnostics or repair the SA modules damaged or send to a DR company who be able to work with SA, on this forum u can found many experts on different countries

Best regards from Mexico

Alberto

[jono-ats]

A WD200 is a 20 GB drive. A WD2000 is a 200 GB drive. Which do you have?

Change the ribbon cable and see if that makes any difference.

Jon

[dick]

Also if you haven't tried already you should connect the drive directly to a different pc motherboard just to be sure.

[Fireman]

Jon,
Sorry about the typo I have a 200GB drive. I've tried a new cable, no luck.

Dick,
I've tried connecting it to a different board with the same results.

Alberto,
I'm going to try and look for the information you mentioned. Not really sure how to get it but I'll find a way. As far as sending it you to a DR company that is unfortunately out of the question for me. I'm paying my way through college right now and I don't have the means to send my drive out for the professional help it probably needs.

Jeff